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Tag Archives: Alice in Wonderland

Where does the time go, you know, when we’ve done with it? I mean, when it’s gone, used up, behind you, where is it kept? Is it being stored in a great big cosmic bedroom at the back of a great big cosmic house? Or is being catalogued so that our descendants can search it to find out exactly what shape Tuesday was and how much January 2007 actually weighed? Or do we just recycle it and in fact the moment you are currently experiencing was last here as a long, dull, Medieval Sunday with nothing on the telly.

The question, where does the time go, applies equally to the yawning chasm between the last time you spoke to your bestest ever uni pal and the news that he has just got divorced as it does to the distance between the starting gun sounding and the time now showing on your PaceMaster 3000. Regardless of race distance there’s always a point where either you’re ahead of time or you’re behind time, or if you’re really lucky, in the moment, but whichever is true, it also true that you just lost 20 minutes or 2 hours of your life that you will not only never get back, but also will never be able to locate, because THEY won’t tell you where THEY keep it. Of course this now raises further questions, such as, if you’re ahead of time, what does the space between time and you feel like? If you slowed to let time catch up, would time thank you or just elbow you out of the way, immune to your protestations because he or she (gender is a debate for another day) is wearing headphones and in the zone aided by Queen’s Greatest Hits (6 million Brits can’t be wrong) on repeat. Or if you’re behind time what does he/she look like? I imagine a big lilac splodgy mass, not unlike Barbapapa but then that’s my age. Of course, time has been defined more precisely as a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff, which clearly supports my Barbapapa theory.

And I can’t even begin to ponder the correct tense for this horological debate, so I’m just going to ignore it, unlike the White Rabbit who just overtook me on the way to the finish line. Him, I will follow, down the Rabbit Hole (“Don’t Stop Me Now!”). Maybe that’s where the time is. In the Underland, guarded by Morpheus and the Time Lords (a glam rock band that never lived up to their early promise). If I’m right, you’ll see me break the two hour marathon barrier at Manchester. If I’m right, you have already seen me break the two hour marathon barrier at Manchester, in fact you have just retrieved that moment from the cosmic catalogue, and it weighed a ton. Yeah, I know. Heavy.